Pet owners frequently enjoy taking their animals along with them on recreational excursions. Sometimes, the animals even play a specific role in the recreation, such as hunting dogs that retrieve birds; other times, the animals are merely along for the ride. In either case, pet owners occasionally find themselves accompanied by their animals on boat rides, and the animals likewise occasionally find themselves in the water. Most animals have a great deal more difficulty transitioning from the water back into the boat than the other way around, and require assistance in their efforts to get back into the boat. Usually, this means a person (either the pet owner or an exceptionally generous good sport) has to lean into the water, grab the (often struggling) animal, and hoist the now-soaking-wet animal into the boat. As might be imagined, the retrieval process is awkward, cumbersome, messy and wet.
There are currently several known ladder and/or ramp devices for allowing animals to reboard a boat under their own power and without human assistance. These include devices described in prior art patents such as U.S. Pat. No. 3,891,053 to Burton, U.S. Pat. No. 4,538,314 to Baranowski, U.S. Pat. No. 4,724,925 to Ritten and U.S. Pat. No. 5,592,801 to Balzer. These designs, while advances over the above-described reboarding technique, all suffer from the drawbacks of being overly bulky, complicated, difficult to attach and detach to/from the boat, and/or not universally adaptable to different boat designs. Thus, there remains a need for a mechanism for facilitating animal travel between the boat and the water that is easily carried and readily attached to most boat designs.